16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence

Once again this year, the Feminist Peace Network is proud to participate in the Take Back The Tech campaign which takes place concurrently with the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence that runs from November 25-December 10.

While the internet is an extraordinary tool for sharing information and connecting with other people, it is also a readily available means of harassing and intimidating people. Women are subjected to an astounding amount of harassment and threatening behavior on the internet and in the ten years I’ve been publishing my work electronically, I have received all manner of hate mail, from the annoying, “Go back to the kitchen” to the death threats that I turned over to law enforcement.

I am hardly alone in this. It has gotten so bad that blogger and activist Sady Doyle recently started a Twitter campaign using the hashtag #MenCallMeThings to raise awareness about just how bad it is. As Doyle explained on her blog,

It doesn’t matter how uniquely charming and witty and acquainted with various fine bourbons you are. Are you a woman? Then they don’t like you.And they especially don’t like you telling them what to do. By, for example, asking them to cut it out with the misogyny.

What I got, friends, were comments. Comments about myself. And blogs about myself. And message-board discussions, also about myself. And e-mails. What I got was what every woman (feminist or not) and openly anti-sexist person (woman or not) on this our Internet gets: I got targeted. With threats, with insults, with smear campaigns, with attempts to threaten my employment or credibility or just general ability to get through the day with a healthy attitude and a minimal amount of insult.

Although as a matter of policy, I usually don’t publish blatantly misogynist comments or respond to them, they are still in my inbox and they throw my mind off kilter sometimes to the point where I can’t write. While I know of course that they don’t reflect on me, these toxic missives sometimes still get under my skin, making me both angry and despairing. Comments such as,

All of u stupid b*****. You don`t wanna cook on Thanksgiving Day, then you don`t eat!!! Go to McD and get a burger with large fries, as I am sure all of are overweight/anorexic.

and,

Just sick and tired of all you good for nothing educatedbut illitrate “feminists” (sic) taking stats out of your hats like some magician.

are not enabling to say the least. (Also sadly, correct spelling and basic grammar competence tend to be quite optional in hate mail.)

On a personal level, it is hard to understand how on earth the men who write these comments could possibly think saying such things are acceptable, But when I wake up at three in the morning pondering why this is, it doesn’t take much to realize that the answer lies in large part in the relentless sexist and misogynist messaging that permeates our media, on radio and television, in movies and video games and on the internet.

One website that has recently come under fire for enabling the acceptability of misogynist hate speech is Facebook. For a long time, they have allowed all manner of pro-rape pages, justifying them as expressions of free speech. It finally took a massive social media campaign to get them to begin to re-examine their policy. As this article on ZDNet explains,

It only took two long months, over 186,000 signatures on a petition to Mark Zuckerberg, and finally a furious Twitter campaign to get Facebook to remove Pages that graphically celebrated and encouraged rape and sexual violence.

However, the article continues,

The social media behemoth has a massive problem with sex. This is exactly what happens when a social network refuses to roll up its sleeves and define sexual expression in its Terms. Specifically, I mean Facebook’s urgent need to define different types of sexual speech or expression as healthy or harmful to its community.

Sex is the Achilles’ Heel of all social businesses. And to that end, transparency can be a cruel mistress.

With zero tolerance for porn and a refusal to define it, Facebook has deleted breast cancer survivor communities (labeling one breast cancer survivor page as “pornography”), retail business pages, individual profiles of human sexuality teachers, pages for authors and actors, photos of LGBT couples kissing (for which Facebook just apologized), and even the occasional hapless user’s profile who has the misfortune of having someone else post porn on their Wall.

With no comprehensible or clear methodology around sexual speech, we see pages deleted that discuss female sexuality, while pages that joke about and encourage raping women and girls rack up the likes.

Not to mention – a petition, and two months, and a whole lotta common sense about doing the right thing with over-the-top troll pages? Just how incompetently can you run your product, Facebook? Very, apparently.

A few weeks ago I discovered for myself that this is indeed true when I received a letter from Facebook telling me they had removed something that I had posted which they claimed violated their terms of service. The letter read,

Hello,

Content that you shared on Facebook has been removed because it violated Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. Shares that contain nudity, pornography, or graphic sexual content, are not permitted on Facebook.

This message serves as a warning. Additional violations may result in the termination of your account. Please read the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities carefully and refrain from posting abusive material in the future. Thanks in advance for your understanding and cooperation.

The Facebook Team

Ominous sounding indeed. They didn’t tell me what they found offensive, but the only thing that they removed so far as I know was a link to another page called “Occupy A Vagina” which I found offensive and that I wanted to make other people aware of. In other words, I wanted to make others aware that another Facebook page was offensive, so I got warned. And the Occupy A Vagina page remained up, despite numerous people reporting it as offensive. According to the page’s author who claims to be female, it is supposed to be a joke. Not, however, one most rape victims would likely laugh at.

The really disturbing part of this is that one might think that it was just a bad call by their filtering system that can be easily explained. But who do you contact to point out the error? Unfortunately, Facebook’s customer service policy seems to be a cross between frat house and CIA rendition which translates to we can come after you for totally absurd reasons and there is nothing you can do about it and we won’t even talk to you. You can’t explain because Facebook makes it all but impossible to communicate with them–no contact form, no email, no phone number.

Via the electronic rights advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, I was able to obtain a phone number. But when you press the option for customer service, you get a recording telling you they don’t offer customer service by phone and referring you back to the website where there wasn’t any way to contact them in the first place. Like I said, frat house meets rendition policy.

I am hardly alone in ending up in Facebook’s customer terms of service black hole, see here and here. But that doesn’t make it better. The effect of receiving a notice like that is chilling. For days I hesitated to post things to Facebook. It is beyond ironic that they tsked tsked me for posting something they deemed inappropriate when what was inappropriate was other Facebook content which they left alone. Too many people have been victimized by their idiotic filters and lack of customer service and the result is that those of us who are working full time to address misogyny and sexual violence are being victimized while those who promote it still have a free run on Facebook.

I’ve been publishing my work on the internet for ten years now. When I first began, I published my work primarily on other websites. But after a particularly bad trolling attack (800 comments long) on one website which the website’s owners basically blew off, it became very clear to me that it was absolutely necessary to have a website where that was not acceptable. Women control only a very small percentage of the media, but at least on the internet, we can create our own misogyny-free writing spaces and as I have pointed out many times before it is crucial to support these spaces and to speak out when websites like Facebook blatantly allow misogynist hatred to be perpetuated.

The Feminist Peace Network is once again participating in the observance of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence which takes place from November 25th – December 10th. The Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University runs a website that has numerous resources about this campaign, including action guides and a calendar of events. Please especially note the Global Day of Action on November 29th. The theme of this year’s observance will be:

Structures of Violence: Defining the Intersections of Militarism and Violence Against Women

About the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence:

The 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence Campaign uses the 16 days between International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (25 November) and International Human Rights Day (10 December) to reinforce that eliminating all forms of violence against women is a human rights issue and that the act of perpetrating violence against women is a human rights violation. The 16 Days Campaign brings the human rights framework to the heart of its work and utilizes it to ensure that both state and non-state actors are held accountable for acts of violence against women.

November 25th was declared International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women at the first Feminist Encuentro for Latin America and the Caribbean held in Bogota, Colombia, July 18-21, 1981. The “feminist encuentros” are conferences of feminists from Latin America who come together every 2-3 years in a different Latin American country in order to exchange experiences and to reflect upon the state of the women’s movement. At that first Encuentro, women systematically denounced all forms of gender violence from domestic battery to rape and sexual harassment to state violence including torture and abuse of women political prisoners. November 25th was chosen to commemorate the violent assassination of the Mirabal sisters (Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa) on November 25, 1960 by the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. In 1999, the United Nations officially recognized November 25th as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

About this year’s theme:

This year marks the 20th 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence Campaign, and with this important landmark, the Center for Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL) is considering new ways to utilize the campaign for transformative change. Year after year, new partners join the 16 Days Campaign to bring local, national, and global attention to the various forms of violence that women face. The attention that gender-based violence has received in international forums is a testimony to the powerful actions of women’s rights activists around the world. Yet, despite this increased awareness, women continue to experience violations in alarming numbers and new forms of violence are emerging. We, as defenders of women’s human rights, have a responsibility to look more closely at the structures in place that permit gender-based violence to exist and persist. After much consultation with activists, organizations, and experts from around the world, militarism has emerged as one of the key structures that perpetuates violence.

While there are many different ways to define militarism, our working definition outlines militarism as an ideology that creates a culture of fear and supports the use of violence, aggression, or military interventions for settling disputes and enforcing economic and political interests. It is a psychology that often has grave consequences for the true safety and security of women and of society as a whole. Militarism is a distinctive way of looking at the world; it influences how we see our neighbors, our families, our public life, and other people in the world. To embrace militarism is to presume that everyone has enemies and that violence is an effective way to solve problems. To leave militaristic ways of thinking unchallenged is to leave certain forms of masculinity privileged, to leave global hierarchies of power firmly in place, to grant impunity to wartime perpetrators of violence against women. To roll back militarism is to inspire more expansive ideas about genuine security, to bring more women into public life, to create a world built not on the competitive sale of weapons, but on authentic relations of trust and cooperation.

There is a need to address militaristic beliefs in all of our societies. Militarism has material and institutional, as well as cultural and psychological consequences that are more difficult to measure. Wars, internal conflicts, and violent repressions of political and social justice movements – all of which are a result of a culture of militarism – have a particular and often disproportionate impact on women. Rape is used as a tactic of war to drive fear and to humiliate women and their communities. But sexual violence is just one form of violence that women and girls suffer throughout the continuum of violence before, during and after conflict has ostensibly ended. Militarism neither ends nor begins in warzones, nor does it confine itself to the public sphere. The families of militarized men and women may experience violence in their homes where ‘war crimes’ and armed domestic violence are hidden from public view, and women who serve in the military are just as easily victims of sexual assault by their fellow soldiers. Even places that are not experiencing conflict directly are not exempt from militarism: they send troops, produce and sell weapons, and invest in the militaries of foreign governments rather than supporting development efforts. These governments have skewed priorities, spending huge percentages of their budgets on the military and arms rather than on social services, such as education, health care, job security, and development that would yield real security for women. For these reasons, the international theme for the 2010 16 Days Campaign will be Structures of Violence: Defining the Intersections of Militarism and Violence Against Women.

The Take Back The Tech campaign runs concurrently with the 16 Days campaign and FPN will be posting actions from that campaign as well. Finally, listen to these inspiring words from Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai about the campaign: